What is SHIBA INU?
SHIBA INU, not to be confused with Dogecoin, is a cryptocurrency which invites dog-inspired artist from around the globe to foster what the creators refer to as the “artistic Shiba movement”, bringing the SHIBA INU community into the non-fungible token (NFT) market.
Key Features and Takeaways of SHIBA INU
SHIBA INU is one of the most popular cryptocurrency tokens that has the following key features and takeaways:
SHIB, the native token of SHIBA INU, features the Japanese dog breed, just like Dogecoin, and even though the two tokens have some similarities, apart from the mascot, SHIBA INU has billed itself as an improved version of Dogecoin along with giving itself the title “Dogecoin Killer”.
Dogecoin was released in 2013 with the intention of being a joke and it has no real-world value or utility, making it nothing more than a vehicle for speculation. Meaning that SHIBA INU must provide an improved speculative coin.
However, this has not happened yet, which does not make SHIBA INU worth the acclaimed title as “Dogecoin Killer”. However, according to the whitepaper, also known as the “Woofpaper”, the founders of SHIBA INU intend for it to make great strides in the cryptocurrency space.
The SHIBA INU coin launched in August 2020 and was created by an anonymous developer who goes by the name Ryoshi. At the time of its launch, SHIB was priced well below 0.01 ZAR and with 1 quadrillion tokens minted, it remained at this price for quite some time.
Despite a non-existing start, SHIB saw an increase in value as interest in Dogecoin started increasing.
In the Woofpaper that Ryoshi drafted, the SHIBA INU project was begun from a simple question, namely what would happen if a cryptocurrency project were 100% run by its community. The question to this is not known yet and all that is known, is that SHIBA INU is an interesting project that is slowly drawing more investors and traders.
The SHIBA INU community has more than 300 000 members and it has begun to create a stir in the crypto community.
On May 14, following a drop of 50% from its all-time high, the SHIB token was up by more than 1 200 000%. There are no other coins in existence that have had that kind of return, and this poses the question of whether the SHIB token deserves such a significant gain in price.
There is nothing that backs SHIBA INU or to give it real-world value, making it more like the Dogecoin that it hopes to surpass and subsequently, hardly making it the “Dogecoin Killer”.
SHIB is an ERC20 token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and interestingly, the developer of SHIB sent half of the total token supply to the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, with the remainder of the supply locked on Uniswap.
In sending half of the supply to Buterin, SHIBA INU claims that these coins have been “burned”. However, this is not burning of tokens in the conventional sense as these coins still exist, albeit in the wallet address of Buterin.
The value of the SHIB tokens which were sent to Buterin was as high as 211 billion ZAR, dwarfing the value of the 330 000 ETH that Buterin holds.
Followers of SHIBA INU learned about this untrue coin burn in May when Vitalik sent more than 50 trillion SHIB tokens, which are worth 14 billion ZAR to Polygon’s run fund, which was established to help combat the spread of Covid-19 in India.
In addition to this, 90% of SHIB token liquidity was drawn from Uniswap and as result of this, there was a multi-day move which sent the SHIB token 50% lower. However, despite this, prior to the drop, SHIB tokens were up 3 300%.
SHIBA INU’s development team has recently announced that it is currently working on its own decentralised exchange (DEX) which will be called ShibaSwap. There is no set date for launch yet, however, the proponents of SHIBA INU claim that it will be a safe, decentralised exchange.
SHIBA INU Mining
SHIBA INU tokens cannot be mined as all tokens were already minted when the token launched in 2020. To obtain SHIB tokens, users must use the various exchanges on which SHIB tokens are listed.
Despite this, with the launch of ShibaSwap, users will be able to dig, bury, and swap tokens to generate returns. These returns will be distributed to “Puppy Pools” where “#SHIBARMY” has buried their tokens, or where they are digging for “bones”.
